Posted
by
CowboyNeal
on Saturday June 02, 2007 @10:59AM
from the no-not-the-cosmic-nullifier dept.

Gary writes "The gigantic red switch looks more like a mushroom straight out of Super Mario. It can be connected easily using two wires and can be activated in any direction. To get rid of the blue screen of death all you have to do is hit it with something (like, a fist)."

This is the lamest 'hack' I have ever seen on Slashdot. You can get industrial panel/remote buttons from just about any industrial or electrical supply store. Then you wire up two leads to your reset button.

I can't wait to see what innovative tinkerer's project comes next on Slashdot. Maybe an LED with brightness control?

Real men don't fool around anymore with digital potentiometers and op-amps when it comes down to the nitty-gritty task of controlling an LED.

Now it's far cheaper to use a microcontroller with pulse-width modulation to guide the LED into it luministic destiny. Get an 8-pin AVR (like the Tiny11) or even a 6-pin PIC microprocessor for less than 50 cents US, preferably one that is in a new surface-mount package much smaller than the LED and fits underneath it. Then write the code that gently awakens the LED from its inner darkness. Be guided in your code by the idea that just as the LED is being raised from its inherent chaotic darkness, so too is man raised from his internal chaotic darkness by the direction and focused energy of Jesus, God, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha, Krishna, Great Spirit, or Whoever (grammar goblins, note the proper capitalization of the indirect pronoun that refers to the deity).

The point is that now it is cheaper to effect a hardware solution with an ultra-cheap microcontroller than it was in the 20th century to do with cheap 555 timers coupled with resistors and caps or to do with TTL clusters. It does require software skills that weren't needed previously. It's a whole new frame of reference for electronic designers. This trend will continue as very fast, (50 MegaHertz system clocks, fast for microcontrollers), very powerful 32-bit microcontrollers with large internal memory continue to fall in price [the 50MHz/32K FlashROM ARM controller has broken the $5 barrier].

Will we ever use a 32-bit microprocessor to control a single LED? Don't laugh too hard. Using a chip that has more internal resources than the original IBM PC to control a few LEDs is not rare now. If some future 128-bit CPU has the ability to be programmed just by talking to it, and it's cheaper than an LED, then why not?

If using the LPT, is there a problem with PWMing the LED directly? Just buffer it if you're worried about current draw. Seems to be the easiest way to do it from the computer and any semi competent programmer could whip up a computer input to PWM program in C in a couple minutes. Depending what the overall project goal is I suppose.

Actually they're dead easy to make. Get a digital potentiometer (variable resistor) and connect it as a current source. Hook your LED up to the current source and there you have it. If you want schematics, try this article [elecdesign.com].

You can do this easily with a PIC controller. I've recently built a (stand alone) RGB mood lamp with one of those things and it works flawlessly. You want PWM (pulse width modulation) to drive the leds in order to get proper attenuation.

Having just taken a BASIC Stamp course, the LEDs we use (http://www.parallax.com/) use +5V and 470 Ohm resistors. You shouldn't need to worry about voltages or resistance because it's generally built into the motherboard.

Could I get one of these fashioned as a Colt 45 or other such instrument of death? I gotta tell ya, sometimes just beating the hell out of something doesn't leave you with the cold, hard final satisfaction that you killed something.

Better yet, hook it up to an accelerometer, which is hooked up to a small monitoring CPU. Put the accelerometer into a punching back. Then right it to send a signal once it reaches a certain acceleration (ie: when you hit it long enough).

Then, set the monitor to start a timer once it registers a high enough average acceleration. Set the time for, say, 10 seconds. If you manage to sustain the average acceleration for a long enough time, the monitor will reset the computer for you.

It's not enough to hit something. It's not enough to hit something hard enough. It's only enough to hit something hard enough, repeatedly, for a period of time. Only then will you have worked out your rage. =)

http://www.automationdirect.com/ [automationdirect.com] is one good supplier. This kind of industrial grade hardware is expensive, so eBay might be the best choice. What you want is commonly called a "mushroom head emergency stop pushbutton". If using it for a PC reset switch, you want normally open contacts, whereas most E-stop systems would use normally closed.

If that Moeller unit is like the other locking Estops I have used, the key doesn't prevent it being PUSHED, but the button won't pop back OUT without the key. I believe that requiring a key in order to activate an E-stop is an OSHA violation. Requiring a key to reset a tripped button is OK, and sometimes helpful in knowing which button was pressed when there are many installed.

RadioShack has some nifty "big buttons" you can buy. I found a lovely large green one there that I modded a case to use it as the power button. They also have quite the selection of smaller momentary switches in case you want something a little more child resistant. Personally, I prefer the lighted bulgin vandal switches from frozencpu.com.

Heeeyy... get one of those rudder-pedal or car-pedal sets and rig it up for Emacs. No! Even better -- jigger up an old pipe organ console for Emacs.

As to the amount of fun: I remember reading back in the old days of foot-powered sewing machines, a woman who positioned herself just so could be masturbating just from the movements of her leg. So yes, your idea with the pedal *could* be fun for geek girls.:-)

Because, of course, a Firefox extension that only a few slashdotter use is MUCH BETTER than actually modifying Slashdot so that ALL links use mirrordot in order to prevent actual slashdotting of web servers world-wide.

I am going to hazard a guess that the two blacks are both grounds and the red and yellow are opposite signals, one for when the switch is pressed and one for when it isnt. This opens up more possible uses, since some hardware wants momentary-open for reset instead of the PC standard of momentary-close.

Maybe that's so it can reset two PC's at once? I have to admit, I was scanning the comments to see if there was a "two wires?" one and if there wasn't I was going to add one. Got beat to it though.

I don't know much about emergency stop buttons, but maybe this one is multiple pole and has two for normally closed and the other two close when the button is pushed? For example the NC would complete a circuit for normal operation and the other two would activate an alarm? Otherwise, "I got nothing".

It would be more fun to make this do some arbitrary software thing. You could do this by wiring it to the power button or something (on ACPI systems under Linux, at least, it isn't hard to make that do whatever you want - just have a program watching/proc/acpi/event).

It might be fun to bind it to "skip track" and hit it hard whenever that song you meant to delete ages ago comes up.

The problem with power is, if something accidentally gets stuck on that button, hold it down for 5 seconds and the machine is OFF. I know you can intercept a single press/release, but if you press and hold, on most boxes, it will eventually shut off no matter what you're doing.

On the last laptop I had Linux on, I played with the lid-close event. That was a bit more useful...

I was scrutinizing the thread hoping that I wouldn't have to write a snarky post myself. You just restored my faith in humanity.

Too bad I don't have mod points right now.

Seriously, hooking an emergency push button to "reset" is newsworthy now? I already thought of that... When I was 16 years old. And even then it only managed to occupy my thoughts no more than 10 seconds before I dismissed the idea as stupid and unfunny.

Oh man, someone needs to take that thing and make it a reset button right now...I would so buy if it served a useful purpose. That would be so amusing...Fellow Worker: Hey dude, your computer froze up on meYou: Okay, just reset itFW: How? (Expecting the location of the reset button)You: Do you see the box on your right? Flip the top switchFW: Okay...You: Now flip the bottom oneFW: Okay...you sure this is the reset?You: Yep, now insert the key on the desk next to it into the keyhole on the left and turn it t

Wire this sucker up in your garage instead and you have a very cool looking and very useful garage door opener. I might even replace my door bell with one. Although it would look painfully stupid outside my front door it might give the javahoas and dish network goons second thoughts about pressing my ESO.

Also if your going to bother making a computer reset switch like this I'd damn well make it useful. Instead of taking 5 minutes to wire it to the reset pins on your motherboard...

There should be a watchdog driver to go with it, if it stops sending keep-alives to the switch it should have an option to press itself. It could also light up in different colors or patterns to indicate various error conditions...

There should be an "enterprise" edition of the same switch only it would be ethernet based using SNMP traps and host MIBs to monitor servers and devices and then issueing reset signals to a managed RPB when pressed.

Is anyone interested in a cell phone that looks like a mineature DHD? The first 100 people who hack the neilson database in order to dramatically improve SG1's ratings get a complimentry DHD phone with lighted chevrons and big red glowing button in the center in their choice of unlocked GSM/UMTS or CDMA models.

One of those switches you see in movies to trigger some major event. Typically they have a molly guard, sound an alarm when the guard is opened and you have to turn two keys at once within one second and mash the button to activate it.

Now THAT would be cool. Imagine having an industrial grade alarm go off as you open the molly guard, red WARNING: RESET ACTIVATION lights coming on, and the final silence as you push the button...

...your computer didn't have the reset switch (hardwired power supply on/off switch) due to the over engineering of it to be a software controlled power switch. That is where this button could have been really handy. Giving back the fundamental power switch so grandma doesn't have to climb under the desk to unplug the power plug.

Even better how about a clapit switch. Then everyone can applaud blue screens of death while MS use the applause are a positive sign of acceptance.

The big red button is too much of a temptation for my 18 mo. old child. The power button doesn't do anything if simply clicked when the computer is on, and the reset switch is this tiny innocuous button that (to him) doesn't look like it does anything. This, on the other hand, screams "PRESS ME!".

We, and everybody else in the DARPA Grand Challenge, had big red EMERGENCY STOP buttons all over the vehicle. Everybody with robots of non-trivial size uses those things.

I am not surprised. Years ago my Dad got thrown out of a small boat he was driving and got to spend the next 10 minutes treading water while it did loops around him. We fixed the problem with a reed switch and a magnet on a string. Similar idea but more fail safe because if it gets away from you then it stops automatically.

Our SOHO system includes a Win98 laptop, NT4 server, XP laptop, XP desktop, and a linux NAS. The Win95 machine was retired about a year ago.

According to my logs, the last crash on any machine was in 2001, and I traced that to a broken network card. Before that was in 1998 when, silly me, I installed some Corel software on the NT machine. A big red reset switch? Gimme a break.

I hope this can be installed on any computer! Just think, rather than coming to the network admin to take out their frustration, the users could take it out on the reset button.

Nooooo!

I don't know about you, but a notable portion of my day is spent responding to users' woes with "Did you try rebooting?" If users learn to reboot their own computers, that would cut the need for us admins in half. This button thingie will lead to mass unemployment. It's evil! Kill it! Kill it!